"The richness of the data in the warehouse, enhanced by geospatial data, gives new analytic power to business analytics creating a tangible competitive advantage for Teradata customers," said Randy Lea, vice president, product and service marketing, Teradata Corporation. "Approximately 80 percent of corporate data has a location reference. Unfortunately, businesses are not yet leveraging location data effectively to solve business problems."

Typically, location data is represented by postal references such as addresses. Although addresses are great for delivering mail, they provide limited value for
business intelligence or analytics. The Teradata geospatial solution enables customers to convert the basic location data in their data warehouse to the common latitude and longitude coordinates, a process known as geocoding. Once converted, the geospatial data can be integrated and analyzed along with other customer data.

The Teradata geospatial solution reduces complexity and decision latency, because it eliminates specialized geospatial data marts, unnecessary data movement, and system integration. Geospatial solutions have typically been implemented in departmental silos or data marts isolating the data from the valuable intelligence in the data warehouse. Companies may have a number of independent data marts with redundant data, which is segregated from business data. The analysis of this segregated data creates untimely, imprecise, and inconsistent business intelligence.

The new ability to leverage geospatial data has been made possible through the combination of the Teradata geospatial capabilities, Teradata geospatial
consulting services and
technology partnerships with firms like Safe Software. Safe Software is the leading global provider of the most complete spatial extract, transform and load (ETL) solution. The Safe Software FME (feature manipulation engine) solution enables users to quickly translate, transform, integrate and distribute spatial data. With FME, users can convert and integrate data from more than different 225 formats, manipulate data into the exact data model that is needed, and share spatial data and ETL tasks over the Web.

"At Safe Software, we are focused on connecting people to data," said Don Murray, co-founder and president of Safe Software. "This new partnership is an essential step in enabling Teradata users to get a unified view of all their data and to make better, more informed business decisions. We are pleased to support Teradata and their customers in this initiative."

"A growing number of organizations are beginning to realize the benefit of integrating spatial and customer data," said David Sonnen, senior consultant for Spatial Information Management, IDC. "The Teradata geospatial solution combined with Safe Software FME solution enables the integration of another key data type into the enterprise data warehouse, providing decision-makers with richer information to support critical decision-making processes."

Teradata geospatial capabilities offer new power for business users. For example, one of Teradata's
telecommunication customers wanted to create a tailored, outbound mail promotion that encouraged consumers to visit the store which was most conveniently located. The mailer was to identify the three closest stores within 50 miles of each customer. Without the Teradata geospatial solution, the company had to analyze location data on 55 million customers and then determine the relationship with over 2000 stores. This analysis required 65 billion complex calculations where 98.5 percent of the results were discarded because they were unusable. With the Teradata geospatial solution, the customer was able to eliminate unnecessary analytic calculations. This reduced query execution time from 75 minutes to three minutes - a 25 times performance improvement.

The combination of Teradata analytic power, rich data in the data warehouse and geospatial data will allow customers to ask important business questions, such as:

-- Retail - How far are high value customers willing to travel to redeem a
discount coupon?
-- Financial - Where should a new branch be built to best serve the most
profitable customers and attract new customers?
-- Insurance - Which customers live in overlapping disaster areas and how
will that impact the insurer's risk exposure?
-- Transportation - How quickly can the company locate and re-route
packages in response to customers' shipment requests?
-- Communication - Which geographic locations have the poorest phone
reception causing customer attrition?

Teradata provides comprehensive geospatial data integration consulting services to assist customers with implementation and optimization of new and existing geospatial environments. Consulting services are designed to enrich business data with geospatial elements and enhance business intelligence, analytic tools and
applications.